Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

waderoush writes "First-generation search engines such as AltaVista — built when the Web had only a few hundred thousand sites — produced notoriously goofy and spam-prone results. Well, when you search the Android Market for 'restaurant guide' and the top result is the U.S. Army Survival Guide, it begins to seem like we haven't come very far. San Francisco-based Chomp is one of the companies trying to fix mobile app search and discovery by leapfrogging Apple, Google, and the other app store providers. Founder and CEO Ben Keighran, creator of the once-hugely-popular Bluepulse text messaging system for Java phones, says the company plumbs the app stores, the Web, Twitter, and other sources to distill accurate keywords ('appwords') for each app. The top apps at Chomp for the search terms 'restaurant guide': Yelp, Urbanspoon, and Zagat, just as you'd expect."

Older web developers will remember meta tags for keywords and site description... use them anymore? Nah, they were from a more innocent age, were it was expected that site owners would limit the keywords and description to accurately describe their site so it would only be found by those really intending to find it.

Ah... happy days.

Google really doesn't have that much to search for in an app submission. They rely pretty much on app owner submitted information. Gosh, we better hope they file accurate keywords and description so only people really intending to find that app will find it... and pigs will fly.

The various app markets are rife with spammers and husslers trying to sell apps no-one needs at outragous prices. It would like trying to index that co.cc domain THAT google STOPPED indexing because it became an impossible job.

But they can't stop indexing their own site.

Their famous fix was to not just look at a site but see how it was linked to. That got rid of the meta tag spam BUT spammers worked around it and with apps, there is no in build linking (remember, the web is all about linking).

Well. There goes one of the reasons you would like to have an App store.

From a normal "store" I would expect when something is sold there that the store owner actually took a look at the thing that is up for sale, and classified it, and put it in the according section with the according keywords.

Any Linux Distro is able to do that with the software that is in their package management. GitHub and Sourceforge are able to do it for the software in their repositories. Mozilla is able to do it for the Firefox ex

When you can't automate something, do it with human power. I don't see why Google doesn't hire a dozen or so college-age kids to do basic data entry on this sort of thing. I'm sure they know how important the power of an accurate search is.

The problem with search is people are attempt to do very different searches all with the same search application. Basically they are expecting the application to guess the nature of the search, whether it be general information, business location, product, local, regional or global. Want good search results you have to be really skilled at searching, surely everyone has not missed the typical web cartoon of the skilled user watching a noob every so painfully slowly going through a web search spending half

Right, but I think the motivation here is greatly exaggerated. The search is only "broken" (if you can call it that) when doing search from the phone. Fire up the android market website and it gets much better. I recall reading somewhere that the market now uses google's search for providing search results, maybe someone can confirm (or refute) this.

So what will happen to all those companies if google flips a switch tomorrow and all phones provide better search results?Also, keep in mind that there are not

Bullshit, search on the web Android Market works exactly the same as the search on the phone. Search restaurant guide on the web market, your top result is the US Army Survival Guide. And the relatively small search index makes it less excusable what a piss poor job Google does on Android Market search. And no, I'm not an Apple fanboy, I own a Droid2 and will probably upgrade to the Droid RAZR, I have no interest in the iPhone. I'm just fed up with how painful it is to find something on the Android Mark

Amazingly enough you can "google" off your pc find the app name and then enter it EXACTLY into the search engine on your phone and walla. I am totally behind this is not how it should be at all, but is it worth bitching about? No.

Might help keep the nasty apps off your phone too as there's user reviews and such out there.

First-generation search engines such as AltaVista â" built when the Web had only a few hundred thousand sites â" produced notoriously goofy and spam-prone results. Well, when you search the Android Market for 'restaurant guide' and the top result is the U.S. Army Survival Guide, it begins to seem like we haven't come very far.

Why would one expect anything different in a civilization where knowledge (like search engine algorithms) is legally locked away indefinitely from the rest of mankind?

So even though the source is closed it's not really "closed" because you know the basics about how it works? The mental gymnastics you Google fanbois go through to defend them art all costs is hilarious.

apt and yum are horrible for searching if you don't know the name. And usually Linux programs have horrible names that tell nothing about the program. So, in the end you're going to be Binging it anyway.

AltaVista, from 1995 to late 1998, provided perfectly acceptable search results that you would be unlikely to find substantially different than the quality of Google's results today. While the speed of the search was slower than Google's today, and it lacked the contextual searching that Google has integrated in the last several years (UPS tracking numbers, weather, calculator, Google Shopping, etc.) results could hardly have been described as goofy or spam-prone. AltaVista also provided a number of advanced search options (such as the NEAR boolean) that it took Google a decade to catch up with.

That all went away when AltaVista was sold to CMGI, and the quality of search degraded radically. AltaVista became a shadow of its former, Google-like self. While AltaVista at any time in the aughts was a laughable alternative to Google, the first few years of AltaVista - in terms of layout and quality of search - were in many ways more Googly than Google, and was clearly the service that Google was aspiring to be when they started.

There was an overlapping window when i would use Google for most searches, but switch back to Alta Vista whenever i wanted to be able to search for an exact word/phrase including punctuation. Eventually Alta Vista dropped the ability to handle punctuation (maybe at the time of the CMGI sale? I dunno) and i pretty much stopped using Alta Vista from that point on.

I give this search engine two thumbs up. I tried it for searches which included "puzzle games", "bird games", "anger games", and "pig revenge game". The later searches target the actual title of the games more than the "niche categories" but nonetheless produced interesting results. Lo and behold - there are no less than 3 Angry Birds knockoff games where (get this) the Pigs take revenge against the Birds.

This seems much more useful than searching Google for "Best Android Puzzle Games" because those re

I searched for tablet news in the Android category. Neither pulse or newsr are on the first page of results, but the Google reader app which is a joke on the tablet is the second result. Maybe they should have categories for tablet apps and phone apps. It's not like google search is much better, because the results for "android tablet news app" just brings links to a bunch of top 10 stories and no links to individual apps. Google app market online has a pretty good result though for "tablet news."

Stop hatin' all you haters! I HAVE the US Army Survival Guide app and it's the best. Talks all about how to watch the locals to see what's good to eat. Way more accurate that Zagats. Sounds to me like Google's app search is working just fine.

Google is the king of search, and Android can't search for files by filename.If you have a ringtone named "smw.mp3" on your phone, you can't find it by searching for Mario.mp3.You can't find it by searching for smwYou can't find it by searching for *.mp3.

You can find it by searching for certain metadata (ID3 tags in this case)."Super Mario World" might return a hit. "Koji Kondo" might return a hit.

If you want to search for files by something as bizarre as their fucking file name, you have to use a 3rd party application, or just mount the fucking SD card in your computer.

Of course, MS isn't much better with Windows Vista and 7 - shit takes ages to search non-indexed locations even if you have a pair of SSDs in RAID 0 and specifically use the file: filter to search for a specific file name only. And it'll take about 8 years if you're searching a network location.

Google is the king of search, and Android can't search for files by filename.

I actually can't really blame them for this, or Apple for that matter. Android is not geared towards traditional use of a filesystem. It is more similar to Apple's use in their apps in which the user doesn't actually see the filesystem. And rightfully so, the myriad of ignorant masses who've never used linux are typically bamboozeled by the directory structure.

This has lead to a general clusterfuck of data on the sdcard of Android devices. Apps typically make a folder and dump their crap in there and hope f

The metadata system is effectively a directory structure where the names correspond to the different fields. They compensate for this rigidity with playlists, but that isn't quite enough sometimes.

The big problem with this system is that you don't always have ID3 info. The non-technical user lacks the ability to modify their ID3 tags, or has them set incorrectly by an automated mechanism which misidentifies the piece. This is to say nothing of unusual formats which can be played via an addin, but don't get

It's not forced, it's just the default presentation, and computer operating systems are heading the exact same way.

Windows XP (or earlier?) with the hiding of file extensions. Windows Vista with the introduction of User Libraries as a storage system for user data. Windows Media Player 9, iTunes, and many similar media players all scan your drives for music and then add them to their own library meaning you don't typically go back to your file system to play stuff. We're in a metadata world now. I don't thin

I don't think you can legitimately download music anywhere without correct metadata applied. Even when you rip CDs most programs auto magically look up the CDDB database for the tags.

It's not so much an issue with downloaded music as with ripped music, which is the case for more obscure stuff. The CDDB database lookup was the issue I referred to when I noted that it doesn't always get it right. Also, let's not forget that the vast majority of music in existence is old music, or that FLAC is the most popular lossless format.

There's also a problem with tags which use non-latin alphabets, like j-pop. The right tags for those consist entirely of characters impossible or extremely difficult

I remember reading about a episode of The OC where they actually used A9.com as a verb ("I'll a9.com it" or some similar nonsense), in response to Google getting verb'ed. Even reading about it made me cringe at how pathetic the attempt was, and frankly "I'll Bing it" isn't far behind.

... with their annoying auto complete feature. Start typing something into the search box and it grabs the first few letters, finds something in its paid ad words database (no doubt) and pastes it in over what I was typing. If I'm in a hurry, I get something completely unrelated to what I wanted.

San Francisco-based Chomp is one of the companies trying to fix mobile app search and discovery by leapfrogging Apple, Google, and the other app store providers. Founder and CEO Ben Keighran, creator of the once-hugely-popular Bluepulse text messaging system for Java phones, says the company plumbs the app stores, the Web, Twitter, and other sources to distill accurate keywords ('appwords') for each app. The top apps at Chomp for the search terms 'restaurant guide': Yelp, Urbanspoon, and Zagat, just as you'd expect."

so.../. is free advertising for startups now? anyone excited to hear the Ben Keighran is the author of text messaging system for java phones? are we impressed?

if they can fool anyone into funding them, good for them. they are providing a service that you have to think google can and will solve in milliseconds.

Honestly, we're going backwards insofar as searching goes. For god's fucking sake, almost 15 years ago, we could do things like proximity searches (only count matches if the words are within N words of each other) and brute-force exact matches of things that would otherwise be stopwords (you know, sequences of words that are individually meaningless and background noise, but refer to something interesting when taken as an exact literal string that has to match verbatim).

Is this like how searching for Macaroni Grill in Abilene, TX brings up a single Macaroni Grill in Seatle, WA on my iPhone? I know there are at least 2 that are within 200 miles but it insists on showing me the one in Northern Seatle, 2000 miles away!